Public-health experts say the key to stemming the Covid-19 pandemic is for people to stay home. But what about people who don’t have a home? Nonprofits that aid homeless people are making big changes — and taking on significant costs — to serve and protect some of the most vulnerable people in their communities.
Miriam’s Kitchen, in Washington, D.C., had to rethink operations in a very short time as the outbreak began to spread rapidly last week in the region. The escalating crisis is putting major stresses on the organization.
The group provides meals and other services from the basement of a church. Its flagship programs are its breakfast and dinner meal programs, designed to feed people with dignity.
In less than a week, the group canceled its volunteer program and shifted from providing cooked meals in the church’s multipurpose room to distributing prepackaged meals in the church courtyard and telling clients to disperse before eating.
“It has been a rapidly evolving situation rolling across this week,” said Scott Schenkelberg, the CEO. “We only really started planning in earnest for operational changes Monday of last week, and it really kicked into high gear on Wednesday, when our leadership team met to go through contingency planning and made some critical decisions about volunteer operations.”
The group created a “virus-response team,” gave all of its full-time staff two weeks of additional paid time off, and implemented telework-friendly policies for those who could do it.
Older Volunteers
Miriam’s Kitchen relies heavily on volunteers. In any given year, about 1,800 people pitch in. They supplement the work of the $6 million organization’s 55 full-time staff members.
But half of the volunteers only serve once, Schenkelberg estimated. There’s a core group of about 100 who form the backbone of the organization’s meal services. On any given day, about 25 volunteers prepare meals from scratch using fresh ingredients.
Schenkelberg said many volunteers are older and thus at higher risk for coronavirus.
“That was one of our considerations when we decided we were going to cease volunteer operations,” he said.
Moving services from the basement to the church courtyard to implement social distancing meant it needed a temporary restroom became clear quickly. That restroom, which also includes a hand-washing station, was being installed on Friday. Officials at the nonprofit also set up large tents to provide others services, like case management. Schenkelberg lamented that without volunteer help, meals are lower quality, with a focus on dishes that are easy to prepare.
“Our hope is we’ll not have to be doing this for more than a month,” he said. “If we are trending towards normalcy at that point — and who knows — I would hope to restore volunteer services.”
Increased Costs
The pandemic demonstrates the need for nonprofits to develop disaster plans, Schenkelberg said.
However, he emphasized that it’s so early in the crisis, it’s hard to see the end of it.
“We do our business in the nation’s capital. If it’s not a virus, it could be any number of things, like another 9/11,” he said.
The early days of the crisis have proven to be expensive for Miriam’s Kitchen.
“We are spending more money now due to these program changes than we budgeted for. This is well above our ‘run rate,’ " said Schenkelberg, who worries about the impact of the crisis on the economy. “Longer term, we worry about our overall revenue. People may not be in a place soon where they are necessarily thinking about making charitable donations.”
Over the past week, officials at Miriam’s Kitchen spent a lot of time contacting the group’s major institutional and individual donors. The message is simple: This pandemic could be an existential crisis for the organization. Early on, some donors were surprised to hear the pandemic was having an impact, though he said that could have been a function of when they were contacted. As the week wore on, the urgency became more apparent to donors.
“One institutional funder said, ‘I didn’t even know that was a problem.’ He hadn’t even thought about it,” Schenkelberg said, describing an early call. “And then there’s the other extreme, where there’s a small group of institutional funders that are already starting to talk about this collectively.”
